The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [178]
62: His reports on Florence Cook were so smitten: Of the many accounts of William Crookes and Florence Cook, I found the most illuminating to be the “Florence Eliza Cook” chapter in Dingwall, The Critic’s Dilemma; see also Podmore’s ruthless expose in Mediums of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 2, 97-103; and Pearsall, The Table Rappers, 93-100. The damage caused to Crookes’s career, and his belated recognition of the risks of spending time with vindictive street mediums, are well covered in Inglis, Natural and Supernatural, which quotes Crookes’s plaintive letter to Home on p. 276.
63: William Fletcher Barrett: Barrett’s story appears in all of the histories of psychical research I have already referenced.
63: “If you can help me”: The 1871 letter Barrett received from William Crookes is reprinted in E. E. Fournier D’Albe, The Life of Sir William Crookes (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923), 199.
64: “On Some Phenomena Associated with Abnormal Conditions of Mind”: The paper rejected for publication by the BAAS was first printed in the Spiritualist Newspaper 9 (Sept. 22, 1876): 85-94. A revised version appeared in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 1 (1882): 238-44.
65: “My opportunities have not been so good”: Rayleigh’s comments supporting Barrett’s mind-reading studies to the British Association for the Advancement of Science are cited in Shepard, Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, vol. 1, 770.
67: “a dreamy mystical face”: The newspaper description of Slade’s physical appearance is cited in Podmore, Mediums of the Nineteenth Century, 2:87.
67: insisted that Slade be prosecuted: Lankester’s investigation of Slade and the resulting trial are detailed in all good histories of paranormal studies. Most of them also deal with the aftermath of his trial in England, which I did not. After fleeing to the Continent, Slade became the subject of some rather famous investigations by the German physicist and astronomer, Johann Zollner, of the University of Leipzig, who was then investigating mathematical notions of a fourth dimension in space. He ran a series of experiments with Slade, seeking to determine if the medium’s apparent ability to levitate and transport objects was due to a talent for accessing the fourth dimension. Slade apparently performed brilliantly in these experiments, but the result was a broadside scientific attack on Zollner’s reputation, including suggestions that he was suffering from senility, although the scientist was only in his early forties at the time.
Henry Slade’s story is summarized in Shepard, Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, vol. 1, 838-40, which describes the last days of his life with some self-righteousness: “He fell victim to the drink habit, his moral standing was far from high and he sank lower and lower. He died penniless and in mental decrepitude in a Michigan sanitorium in 1905.”
68: a woman he could not have: Frederic Myers’s love affair with Annie Marshall dominates his, autobiographical sketch, Fragments of Inner Life, and is recounted in all histories of the psychical research movement, in the most detail in Gauld, Founders of Psychical Research, 116—24.
69: Myers caught the dark scent of the occult: His sittings with the Parisian mediums are described in a letter to Henry Sidgwick on August 16, 1877, archived at the Society for Psychical Research, London, and reprinted in Gauld (1968).
70: “hints that Gurney’s pretty wife ... had married for money”: The most critical view of the marriage between Edmund Gurney and Sara Kate Sibley can be found in E. A. Sheppard, Henry James and “The Turn of the Screw” (Auckland, New Zealand: